SWANS
by Janet Frame, 1951

"Swans" is an early Janet Frame story from her first book, The Lagoon and Other Stories. While the volume was published in 1951, most of the stories in it, including "Swans," date from 1946, written at a time when the young Frame had emerged from a brief term in a mental hospital before she returned for a series of stays that were to last eight years. The story is typical of her early work in its subject, theme, structure, and impressionistic method. Like most of the stories in her first volume, it has a simple, anecdotal surface.

The mother of two young girls, Fay and Totty, takes them on the train to a beach, recognizable as Waikouaiti, south of Oamaru on New Zealand's South Island, where Frame grew up. They go on a weekday, and thus Dad, the usual family organizer, is not with them. Just before they leave, they discover that Gypsy, the family cat, is ill, but they leave her food and water, and Mum assures the girls that she will be all right. Mum is a bit inept, gets them off at the wrong station, and takes them to a strange beach, with no merry-go-round or ice cream and with a "different sea." But the day is a success for the children, they enjoy themselves thoroughly, and they return to the station by a shortcut across the tidal flats of a lagoon where they see mysterious black swans. They return home tired but happy only to discover that Gypsy is dead.

As in her first novel, Owls Do Cry (1957), in the story Frame juxtaposes the innocent, seemingly timeless world of childhood (the "cowslip's bell" of the novel) with a frightening world of time and death, a world where "owls do cry," just as in her own life her childhood world had been disrupted by the drowning of her sister Myrtle in 1937. Most of the story is seen through the eyes of the children, and the reader shares their joy in the experiences on the train and at the beach—the sound of the train, "clackety-clack, Kaitangata, Kaitangata," the surf "breaking white on the sand and the seagulls crying and skimming and the bits of white flying," the joy of play on the beach, where "you could pick up the foam before it turned yellow and take off your shoes and sink your feet down in the wet sand almost until you might disappear and come up in Spain, that was where you came up if you sank." Theirs is a world of sensuous immediacy and of warm security, and they trust their mother and the protection she offers them, as when she reassures them about Gypsy: "Mother always said things would be all right, cats and birds and people even as if she knew and she did know too, mother knew always." Their world seems timeless: "… the two little girls knew for sure they would never grow up and be people in bulgy dresses…." They take the swans as an image of their secure existence: "nothing but peace and warmth and calm, everything found, train and sea and mother and father…." Dotted throughout the story, however, are hints of Mum's actual fears and doubts, which are voiced when they arrive at the "wrong sea"—"Oh things are never like you think they're different and sad. I don't know"—and unvoiced when they see the swans at the end of the day—"and mother was sad and quiet, the wrong sea troubled her … what had she done?" The death of Gypsy contradicts Mum's assurances and undermines the sense of security. The happy day has not lasted forever, as the children had wished, and time and death are quietly waiting to conquer all. The titular black swans are finally not images of warmth and security but of time and death, against which Mum cannot protect the children or even herself. Other stories in the volume, such as "Keel and Kool" show death invading the family (although the names are different from story to story, the characters are similar), and the cowslip's bell of childhood is shown to be only a vulnerable and temporary shelter against a dark and frightening world.

The implicitly epiphanic structure of "Swans," working through the juxtaposition of recurrent images and motifs, is typical of the early Frame, as is the impressionistic method. The method is similar to that used by Katherine Mansfield in such New Zealand family stories as "Prelude" and "At the Bay" and by Robin Hyde in her account of her New Zealand family, The Godwits Fly. The point of view is third person, focused mainly on the children's perceptions, but it sometimes slips into second person: "[Mother] was big and warm and knew about cats and little ring-eyes, and father was hard and bony and his face prickled when he kissed you." The point of view provides enough glimpses of the mother's feelings, however, to make a contrast with the children's and to imply the darker authorial vision. The free, indirect discourse allows for an easy slippage in and out of the children's diction and syntax: "All day on the sand, racing and jumping and turning head over heels and finding shells galore and making castles and getting buried and unburied, going dead and coming alive like people in the Bible." The phrasing and the present participles and paratactic structure evoke the sensuous immediacy and the innocence of the children's world, while the implicit reference to Lazarus is a quietly ironic authorial reminder of the omnipresence of death, although in Frame's world there is no resurrection.

The story, then, is simple but suggestive, an early creation of the interplay of innocence and experience that has come to characterize much of Frame's work. And even at the age of 22 she was in command of an effective impressionistic method. In the next 50 years she would write many more complex and sophisticated narratives, but just as Owls Do Cry holds a special place in her work not negated by her later more complex postmodern novels, so "Swans" and the other stories of The Lagoon hold a special place in her short fiction as powerful early expressions of a developing vision.

—Lawrence Jones